From Cameron Boozer to Caleb Wilson to Darryn Peterson and beyond, the current freshman class of college basketball stars is light-years beyond what anyone even imagined.
With all of the talent most likely heading to the 2026 NBA Draft, quite a few franchises have been called out for tanking, with some teams even getting fined by the league. Now, the NBA is taking even greater and more drastic steps to try to stop teams from tanking.
What is tanking the NBA?
The NBA Draft is based on a lottery system, where the top picks in the order are determined by basically drawing team names out of a hat. The worse a team does in the season, the more times its name is entered into said "hat," virtually increasing its odds to get one of the top picks.
Because of how the system works, it has become a common occurrence for teams to sit their best players or take their feet off the gas pedal to some degree, causing themselves to lose games throughout the second half of the season.
In other words, teams lose on purpose to increase their chances of getting one of the top picks out of the lottery.
New NBA anti-tanking rules
Earlier this week, the NBA and Commissioner Adam Silver announced that next season, there would be new rules to prevent teams from tanking for draft picks. While the specific rule changes weren't revealed, a source told ESPN a few of the measures that had been discussed:
- "First-round draft picks can be protected only for top-four or top-14-plus selections
- Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date
- No longer allowing a team to pick in the top four in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes
- Teams can't pick in the top four the year after making the conference finals
- Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records
- Lottery extended to include all play-in teams
- Flatten odds for all lottery teams"
Just last week, the NBA fined the Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers for holding supposedly healthy players out of games in an effort to stop both franchises from tanking for this year's draft.
While Boozer will still be one of the top draft picks, if not the No. 1 pick overall, the team that drafts will be determined by sheer talent and performance, instead of a team tanking to pick up the legendary Blue Devil freshman.